I was wrong.

His smooth, reasonable voice found some final chamber that grief had not reached, and carved a fresh wound into it.

“Dad,” I cried, “my entire family was wiped out today.” “I hear you, sweetheart,” he said, in the exact flat tone he might have used to decline a lunch invitation.

“But today is your sister’s special birthday.

So we simply cannot come.” And then the line went dead before I could say another single word, before I could beg, before I could make him understand — and, I would come to realize, there had never been anything to make him understand, because he had understood perfectly, and had simply decided that a steak dinner mattered more than his daughter standing alone beside three caskets.

Chapter 4 — Three Caskets